The 2024 Wyler-Silver Prize Winner ---Gradual Emancipation Politicians and Immediate Emancipation Camps Struggle Together the Transform the Union and Win The War 330 pp, $50.00, 2024.

at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.

The prize committee praised Dr. Cirillo's book as follows: "In an extraordinarily nuanced and well-written analysis of abolitionists, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionists Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union assessed how these men and women acted during the war that ended slavery.

Even the abolitionists who had fought so hard to end slavery had to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations on how to achieve their goals amidst the unprecedented transformations wrought by a massive war. In this ambitious study, Cirillo found that these ideologues, specifically those who had advocated for the immediate end of slavery, divided on the verge of achieving their most dearly held ambition. 

On the one hand, some of these men and women continued their allegiance to immediate and radical action to end slavery to ensure America’s moral redemption. Those who stayed true to immediatism rejected political maneuvering because they believed achieving abolition by political means corrupted their movement. 

On the other hand, some immediatists joined the political fray and supported the Republican Party to achieve their purpose. These interventionists were willing to sacrifice the purity of their movement to ensure slavery's end. Cirillo argues that the unrepentant immediatists' predictions came true; interventionists’ political allegiances resulted in their sacrifice of racial justice because they had identified their movement with the Republican Party and its limited vision of emancipation, which rejected both the need for white redemption and black equality.

 Lincoln understood the reason for this realignment when, in the Second Inaugural Address, he asserted, 'Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.'  If the people most likely to support African American social, civil, and political rights embraced black freedom as defined by white racist partisans during this cataclysm, then the formerly enslaved had little chance of fully realizing the benefits of emancipation. 

This book contributes significantly to understanding the United States’ failure to make emancipation more meaningful despite the realization of immediatists' decades-long dedication to the slave's cause."

Text Dource: https://lsupress.org/9780807179154/the-abolitionist-civil-war/

GRANT'S OWN WORDS, ANNOTATED

 

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2017, 816 pp., $39.95

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been in publication since their original re‐ lease in 1885, just months after Grant’s death from a long bout with throat cancer. In this most recent edition, the editorial staff of John Marszalek, David Nolen, and Louie Gallo has assembled a completely annotated version of this autobiography, a Herculean effort for which we should be grateful.

Grant’s narrative remains a masterpiece: “not only a major piece of war literature, but also a classic of all American literature … the pinnacle of American nonfiction” (p. xxvi). The editorial team maintains as much of Grant’s original prose as possible, only cleaning up typographical errors and errata in the main narrative while acknow‐ ledging when such steps are taken. Grant’s pith, humor, and erudition seep through every page. Much of his humor comes from self-deprecation, which makes the book feel like it was written by an everyman who recognizes his flaws rather than the man often credited with winning the war that divided the United States. He recalls moments from his life, specifically from his time in combat, down to the day that they occurred with precision as to what was said to whom and where. His battle against cancer as he wrote these memoirs makes his recall and his prose even more incredible, and his dedication to completing this task kept him alive as long as possible, succumbing to his dis‐ ease but days after he last put pen to paper on this project. Grant wrote a book in which all readers can find value.

The editorial staff mention in their acknowledgements that they have tried to do as Grant wrote in his memoirs: “Everyone has his superstitions. One of mine is that in positions of great responsibility everyone should do his duty to the best of his ability” (p. 767). With the publication of this work, they have fulfilled the tall order given H-Net Reviews by the man at the heart of this project many years ago.

H-Net Reviews   [online link to complete text of review]